


the principles of the endgame

by inverse



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-02
Updated: 2017-09-02
Packaged: 2018-12-22 23:18:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11977176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inverse/pseuds/inverse
Summary: when it comes to shiro, the odds of the universe are stacked against keith. (featuring four alternate realities -- each not more dire than the last, but you can be the judge of that.)





	the principles of the endgame

**Author's Note:**

> a.k.a. four mini bad ends and one big bad end, the fic
> 
> without spoiling anything, there is no major character death in this fic so i didn't check off the warning box, but there is very minor, implied character death. caveat lector.

Below are four parables – four of many. Which one would you rather? You do not have much of a choice:

 

 

**α**

Shiro has taken well to being on board the Castle again, even after months of being away. Over several days he recounts how he escaped from the Galra fleet he was on after being captured for the second time – till now, they have no idea how he’d vanished and turned up on one of the Galra’s ships, but their best bet is still the teleportation function on the black lion, that Zarkon had siphoned him away during the last few seconds of that crucial battle, warping him through time and space, bones and all.

“All I had on my mind was the need to survive,” he recounts, clearly fatigued by the experience but no longer worn down by his repeated memories of trauma. He glances at his hand, the Galra one, of unidentified matter and purpose, then smiles tiredly and continues, “This hand … It saved me. Unexpectedly. I cauterised the wound on my leg with it. The aliens who captured me but fed me and gave me their ship and gifted me with the chance to escape – I cannot thank them enough. I hope they are safe and well.”

“We’re just glad you’re back,” Lance grins, patting him on the shoulder. “Don’t go missing on us again, okay? You should have seen Keith. He was about to chew our heads off, every minute, every day. If you’re a friend of ours, maybe try to stop that from happening again.”

“Glad you’re back,” Hunk echoes, then Pidge, then Allura, then Coran offers to make dinner in celebration. Every day is dinner in celebration now that Shiro is back. Keith keeps quiet, sticks to the walls. Whatever he’s wanted to say to Shiro, he’s already said to him in private. There’s nothing he wants to add.

The black lion continues to reject Shiro. It’s hard to know why. In their downtime Shiro sits in the cockpit for hours at a time, hoping to bond with the lion again, to no avail. Not even a glimmer of hope. Allura finds herself hard-pressed for an explanation, though Shiro has made it clear time and again that she doesn’t have to come up with one. In the hangar she stands with both Keith and Shiro and tries to explain, worrying her lip, distressed over not being able to provide an answer, “It is possible that Voltron has decided that our current arrangement is the one that provides the most stability. I’m sorry, Shiro, but maybe the fact that you have been gone for a while has something to do with it. I’m sure that the black lion will come around. The bonds between the lions and their Paladins do not erode this easily. Perhaps we will need more time.”

“It’s fine, Allura,” Shiro says, voice calm and reassuring, then lays a firm hand on Keith’s shoulder. “I think we’re in good hands if Keith is piloting the black lion. He’s doing a fine job of leading Voltron, and our operations are running smoothly under his command. There’s no hurry, and if I have to give up the black lion, so be it.”

“You won’t have to give her up,” Keith interjects. “She was yours from the beginning. You just have to keep working on it.”

Shiro seems taken aback by his outburst. Then his eyes warm into fond, friendly half-moons, and he says to Keith, in that familiar, grounded tone Keith has always wanted to hear whenever he’s needed strength, “I know that, buddy. Thanks for always having my back.”

Sometimes they clash over their ideals of leadership – not to the point of having an argument, of course. It’s what Shiro had always wanted for Keith, having seen that potential in him, and if only he could have a little more patience, if only he could see a bit more of the big picture, he would have done a better job than Shiro ever did in his brief time as the head. “You focus too much,” he would say, not unkindly, during their debriefs after missions, “on trying to maximise the results of the operation. Sometimes it’s wiser not to go after the target if that means that it puts significant pressure on your resources and endangers your lives. You’ve got this, Keith, I know you do.” Keith tries to convince himself that he does. Over time, it gets easier to find a compromise between what he thinks is best and what Shiro and the crew think is best. In Shiro’s place, he tries his best.

Occasionally the black lion behaves in peculiar ways. A less experienced pilot would have mistaken these anomalies for instances of malfunction, but Keith knows better. At a visceral level, he knows the lion is trying to tell him something, but he can’t help but feel that the message isn’t meant for him. He doesn’t tell the team and tries to solve the puzzle alone, and swears to himself that he will alert the rest if he stumbles upon anything important.

This is the mystery. Every now and then the lion brings him away to another dimension where there is nothing except for dark matter and pulsating stars, the visual flashing across his mind’s eye for seconds each time, as if relaying a signal from this unfamiliar place – when he’s boarding, during missions, on the nights he spends sitting in the harbour of its mouth waiting for more. He keeps a log of these occurrences. Over the next month they increase sporadically in frequency, numbering several times each day, then nothing, then several times each hour, the same black plane of dense nothingness with nothing and no one in it. He is sure that a breakthrough is imminent when the transmissions cease. He waits, but there is nary a blip even after a week. “Talk to me,” he begs, when they are alone. “You know something.” The controls vibrate in his palm. When he emerges from the hangar Shiro is at the door, arms crossed, expression fierce and proud.

“You did great again today,” he says, a hand on Keith’s shoulder. “I’m proud of you.”

 

 

**β**

The pod crashes onto the asteroid when Keith is about to leave for another belt, approaching like an angry torpedo, too fast for anything to stop its course. It’s not a large piece of aircraft by any means, not even the size of a small ship, and Keith reckons that it’s just about big enough to carry one person. He takes shelter in the cockpit of his own ship and braces for the impact when the pod lands just mere metres away. There is no fire, just dust and debris from the wreckage. The sensors on Keith’s ship detect a heat signal from within the pod, but nobody emerges from within.

Keith unlocks the hatch and leaps out of his seat. He approaches the pod cautiously. The glass door on the pod is murky, but just clear enough for him to make out the shape of a creature lying beneath, unmoving, about the size of a grown man. Bracing himself for disappointment, he hacks away at the hinges with his blade. When he finally manages to remove the door, he finds exactly what he expected – it’s Shiro, but not the one he knows.

He hauls this Shiro into the back of his ship, where all the cargo normally goes, rags and all, and lets him continue sleeping. He doesn’t seem to be in any immediate danger, save for a few scrapes from the crash. Keith lets his gaze linger for a few seconds on his face – the shock collar complete with burn marks and the scar on his cheek are notable, but he’s seen worse in past encounters – and then takes off towards his next destination.

The Valderonite soldiers he meets with next agree to help nurse Shiro back to health. He wakes up in their barracks at the break of dawn, gasping for breath and covered in a cold sweat. He takes in his surroundings, eyes wild, and Keith holds him down and offers him some water.

“Keith,” Shiro says, stunned. “Where are we? How long have I been gone?”

Keith tells him, “Drink.”

Outside, the soldiers are regrouping after the last siege. In this reality there is not yet an intergalactic war nor a particular species of warmongers; instead, multiple planets are too preoccupied with their own brand of strife to even begin thinking about conquering the universe. As a frequent traveller between dimensions, Keith sells information. The amount of data that he accumulates during his travels is vast and sprawling, a useful consequence of his quest, and he sells the data to help fund the continuance of his search, which, according to his own estimate, has lasted about five Earth years or so. There is no sign of the person he is looking for here, and he will travel to another reality after loading up on fuel, courtesy of the Valderon peoples.

He relates his story to the incarnation of Shiro sitting in front of him with the weariness of having done it hundreds of times before. It is a tale that is difficult to stomach, but he thinks that it is better to be frank in this case than to hide the truth in kindness. Knowledge of the facts at hand will enable them both to act swiftly.

This is his story: Keith, member of the resistance on an Earth besieged by alien forces on the verge of universal conquest, is recruited by rebels from a nearby colony to join the fight in space. He is joined by Shiro, his mentor and confidant; they fight alongside a band of eccentrics to undermine the invasion, travelling as far as two galactic quadrants away and aiding in the recovery of meteorites that could help craft powerful weapons for their cause. Some two years on, Shiro is captured by soldiers of unknown alliance. The rebellion’s technology traces their whereabouts to a dimensional rift, and their leader, Lotor, agrees to help Keith cross over, but because their resources are spread thin, he will have to embark on the search alone.

Hence begins his long, fruitless journey. Over the past few years, he must have travelled to over ten different realities, searching them from end to end. The more he travels, the more he realises this one unsurmountable truth – that the boundaries of space and time are despairingly wide and infinite. It is not enough to persuade him to give up on his mission, but it can be enough to subdue one who is predisposed towards hopelessness. He watches the colour sap out of Shiro’s face as he begins to realise that the chance of him returning to where he came from, that the chance of him meeting with anyone who’s looking for him through so many planes of existence, is impossibly slim. It makes him wonder if the Shiro he’s looking for is still alive after being held captive for half a decade, but such thoughts are counterproductive, and he’s trained himself to grit his teeth and keep going.

“I’ve met others just like you, many times. Other versions of you, I mean,” he finishes. He doesn’t mention that he’s met another version of himself, too: alien royalty of a martyred ancestry. The Shiro in that universe - a paladin of the court – is long dead.

“I’m sorry,” Shiro says, cupping his face in his hands. “This is too much to take in all at once. I – I don’t know what to think.”

“I’ll give you some time alone,” Keith says, getting up from the crate he was sitting on and dusting his hands. There are a few loose ends to tie up before he moves on.

He hesitates for a moment when he gets to the door, then figures it couldn’t hurt to mention it. He turns back to find Shiro still hunched over in bed, clutching the makeshift blanket in his fists, expression dazed.

“I’ll be leaving before sunset today and I don’t know when I’ll circle back here again. Do you want to come with me?” he asks, and already knows the answer.

 

 

**γ**

The waiting is the worst, so instead of waiting, Keith decides to do something about it. He never gives up, even if the rest of the crew have repeatedly warned him that none of them are skilled enough to navigate the potential consequences of experimenting with quintessence or trying to treat quintessence-related poisoning. He’d never put any such plan into action without making sure it would work first, anyway – he’d take a calculated risk, but he’s not insane. Allura is the first one to lecture him, telling him that he’s really lost his cool this time. Lance sends him wary, concerned looks during briefings. Pidge helps him with research so much it eats into her sleep, but he can tell that even she doesn’t believe anything would work on Shiro anymore. And Keith – Keith doesn’t sleep much anymore either.

They toy with the idea of preserving his memories first – that is to say, they, meaning the rest. As a failsafe, in case his condition deteriorates quicker than they expect it will, and then at least – at least they would have some way to access this memento of their comrade. But Keith doesn’t want this for Shiro; Shiro doesn’t deserve this, and Keith doesn’t want a solution that takes his impending and eventual demise to be a certainty. He wants a solution that ensures Shiro’s continued survival. That they have to debate this in the first place is preposterous. There should be no argument to the contrary at all.

Quintessence poisoning is dissimilar to poisoning as induced by substances derived from the physical environment, for the very substance of quintessence lies in its ability to fundamentally alter the quality of life itself. There are no antidotes, not even to the knowledge of the wise Alteans of old. The Galra have made this an art, and who better to experiment on than their own lowly soldiers and their hapless captives from all over the universe?

This time, when Shiro returns from captivity, it’s not just his arm that’s been toyed with; there’s something in his blood that’s making him ill, rewriting his genetic code – something that’s rendering him inhuman or incapacitated from the inside out. He recovers, then eats well but never feels well; feels restless, something which only Keith is privy to at first; feels feverish at times but simultaneously powerful, more than what he’s used to. They decide he needs more rest and relegate him to starboard duty. Then the aggression begins followed by a period of reclusion, and then he tries to maul Lance and Pidge with his Galra arm while they check up on him one night.

“Maybe they were trying to turn him into – a combat machine or something. Like the Robeasts we fought before,” Hunk hypothesises during a late-night meeting as Coran runs yet more tests on Shiro in a cryo-pod, then promptly looks away when Keith glares at him. “Hey, don’t go looking at me like that. It’s just a suggestion. They’re capable of it.”

Keith believes they are going to find the cure soon. With the assistance of the Blade of Marmora, they’ve managed to locate the key Galra ports where refined quintessence is transported in large amounts. Allura’s contribution to their quest – an educated guess as to the restorative properties of raw quintessence, but because she believes its usage in such a case unethical, she insists that they find another way around it, even when time is not on their side.

But perhaps the biggest obstacle to this conundrum isn’t the fact that no one knows what is going on, or the difficulty in finding a tried-and-true remedy, or the lack of time and resources needed to find one. Time and again, Shiro is the one to tell Keith to concentrate his attention elsewhere on more important things, as if he weren’t important to Keith, as if he thought Keith would subscribe to this false equivalence.

“It’s a lost cause,” he tells Keith, mouth a grim line, “I can – feel it changing me. I don’t know what they did. Maybe they’ve been planning this for a long time coming – replacing my arm, those fights in the gladiator arena. I feel like I’m losing my mind. I might put all of you in harm’s way. I could turn into something that wanted to harm you. I can’t let that happen. You should go with the others. Leave me behind.”

“I told you I’m going to save you as many times as it takes,” Keith snaps, frustrated, “why are you being so stubborn? Nothing’s gonna happen to you, and that’s final.”

“It’s not about what you want for me,” Shiro says. The hand he closes around Keith’s wrist is shaky and devoid of strength, the way a ghost might make contact with a loved one in the dead of night. “I appreciate everything that you’ve done, Keith. But you have to face the facts sometime.”

“I don’t know why the universe keeps trying to take you away from me,” Keith says before he can stop himself, upset at everything that Shiro’s just said. Maybe he’s even upset at Shiro himself. He hates how unguarded he sounds, furiously helpless without any alternatives; if Shiro can’t believe that he’s going to live, then Keith would have quietly done the work for the both of them, and he did. But now: “I don’t know what else I can do to make sure you’re safe. The prospect of a reality without you in it is not something I can comprehend. I’d do anything if I could. But it seems like I’m not even allowed to do that. Not even to try.”

 

 

**δ**

Out here on Romanos, in sector VR-08, a group of seven planets are intertwined with five large stars, each one more brilliant than the last. Romanos is the most inhabitable of the seven, and VR-08’s position as a neighbour to several other crowded planetary systems makes it an ideal location for a Galaxy Alliance outpost. Twice a day without fail, Shiro makes it a point to go to the observatory tower to watch the stars align perfectly, and Keith accompanies him at least once unless he receives an assignment that’s absolutely critical.

Not staying on Earth after the fall of the Galra empire seemed like an obvious choice. They’d returned for the briefest amount of time, but there was nothing left for the either of them; the planet had changed so much and so little at the same time, so foreign and unfamiliar, so stagnant and small. Living on the outpost affords them what they both want most – for Shiro, a chance to continue the exploratory work he so loved, and for Keith, freedom unbridled.

A long time ago, Keith wouldn’t have dared dream of an outcome like this, though he certainly did wish for it. To say that he has found happiness is an understatement. But happiness, with its hefty implications, represents a sort of illusory perfection that is difficult to maintain. So instead he prefers to think of it thus: he is happy. He is contented. Leading an existence where there are no longer pressing questions about who he is and no longer needing answers to those yet left unanswered.

The outpost is inhabited by several other patrol guards as well, but Keith is the only one who really takes an interest in Shiro’s work, which mostly consists of calculations, projections, and hard science. Most of these guards are soldiers from other planets affiliated with the Alliance, posted there on a rotational basis. Shiro no longer participates in orchestrating expeditions, rescue missions and the like, no longer flies or commands or sorties; he prefers to stick to his observations of their planetary system, and Keith’s Garrison background makes listening to his excited, rambling spiels that much tolerable.

“There seems to be the birth of a new galaxy just some way from our sector,” he marvels one afternoon, beckoning Keith to the telescope. “This is unprecedented – the old logs did not predict the movements of these star clusters. Wait till I tell Matt and Pidge – they’re gonna be psyched.”

“You forgot how long it took your message to reach them the last time, even with the wave transmitter Pidge modified for us,” Keith snarks at him before looking into the lens to find a swirling mass of pink and yellow stars congregating around a single point. “With any luck, this galaxy will have matured by the time they get back to you.”

Keith knows what the others say. Not maliciously, but out of curiosity. It’s ice breaker talk, especially for the new recruits, gossip about their pleasant, friendly, distant coordinator, with one arm left from his time in the Great War. Rumours true and untrue: he was a spy who turned twice; he singlehandedly defeated an entire colony of Galra soldiers; he’d lost that arm in combat, had it reattached, only to lose it again in a freak accident involving a proton generator; he was brainwashed and barely remembers anything from the last ten years; the psychic link he still has to the original Black Paladin, of legendary Voltron lore, could awaken Zarkon’s ancient, unrestful spirit. Keith never quite tells them to zip it, but they can sense when he thinks enough is enough. It hasn’t been that long since the Galra were declared a friendly people, and his heritage makes them especially wary. But he doesn’t care.

“I know what they say,” Shiro tells Keith sometimes, chuckling in a self-deprecating manner that would not have been possible for him even a few years ago. “I worry. They think I’m unfit to lead this agency.”

“They respect you,” Keith reiterates, as he always does.

This is Shiro’s half-truth – that while his memory is patchy, it’s not due to brainwashing, and nor does he have an incomplete picture of his past. Instead, his subjugation at the hands of the Galra has caused him to forget, whether due to damage to his synapses, or as a defence mechanism, parts of his history, or to pass off imagined occurrences as fact. In recent years he’s begun to keep a journal in order to try to keep track of what he thinks he recalls and what he does not, but even then the details are hazy; Matt and Pidge are people he knows he knew back on Earth, but sometimes he thinks of the surname Holt and wonders how they are related to him, and he knows he has killed before, but he doesn’t remember the motive, whether the Galra made him do it or if he did it of his own accord, and the background of the victims. Sometimes he is sure he did it for a nobler reason. Other times he thinks it might have been in self-defence. Maybe it was due to personal weakness. The Garrison was home in his late, lonesome teens. Keith is a person he knows he trusts, so on the bad days, he believes Keith when he says that Shiro is still his own person even if his own memory lies to him.

“Do you think there’ll come a day when I forget everything?” he poses the question to Keith, but it’s not something Keith can answer with any certainty. “It’s possible, isn’t it? You’ll have to be honest with me then.”

“I will,” Keith promises. “You don’t have to worry about anything.”

Being honest is easy. It’s the acceptance of the possibility that the Shiro whom Keith knew could be lost forever to the ramifications of a war he did not want to fight in, and in his place, a new, increasingly unaware, blissfully ignorant Shiro, ripe for the absorption of a history that Keith will have to narrate in his place, that will be difficult. But that might be for the better. For if with the complete erasure of his past there can be for him peace of mind, even taking the good things with the bad, then that would constitute happiness. That would constitute contentment. It might even constitute joy. Keith can’t think of anything else he might want for Shiro other than that.

 

 

*

 

Or perhaps to have assumed that he would always be in your life, even for you to have quietly wanted him without expectation of reciprocation, was premised on the faulty presumption that the existence of his own person was anything that you or he or anybody else had absolute control over. Why would you have thought otherwise? Did you take for granted that because he was so different from yourself in every aspect, that the pattern of his life so far had dictated it, that nothing untoward would happen to him like it had happened to you? That fortune would continue to befall somebody so consistently virtuous that the heavens had no other option than to reward him for every good thing he did?

Or perhaps the heavens were not blind to his deeds. Perhaps you were the target of their whims instead. Perhaps you had asked for too much, in your hope that if you could have nothing else, you could have this – you could have him, not even as somebody to live your life with, but merely a light to guide you through the morass. You’d thought that was enough and the gods mocked this paltry wish of yours and chastised you for daring to gamble. Hence: Your father, a vagrant; your mother, a ghost; the person you love, an apparition so tenderly cursed. The cosmos had always had you in check. 

When you first met him, you’d thought with good reason that a person like this, so brave and smart and kind, was too good to be true, because no one you ever knew was so good as to be true. Then you knew him, and he was everything that he suggested he was despite your objection and disbelief, and your suspicion turned into fear you wished would never manifest. The fear of having something you knew could not last. The fear of eventual loss.

Let this, then, be a fable for those unlearned: To the traveller in a desert a mirage is but a falsity. But your brief, intense joy, and you did not know it was brief, made you arrogant. You forgot from whence you’d came and what you were entitled to. You thought that because of him, the shape of your life had changed. With good reason you had thought the following when you first met him, and how much more unfair could it have been that it was he who made you forget: a person like this was too good to be true.

**Author's Note:**

> to say writing this fic gave me acid reflux is not a stretch and would actually be closer to fact. i'm well aware that i have a knack for the terrible but this fic, the idea of which filled me with glee, gave me no joy to write. the general concept was to develop a sort of "situations in which things get steadily worse for shiro, and keith will lose him again and again in various ways" after the main themes of S3 (i.e. the oft-quoted "as many times as it takes"), and if the scenarios portrayed were not distinct enough (my fault because even after the entire writing and editing process i went "WHAT" re-reading every single section), then here is a rough breakdown:
> 
>  **α** \- clone shiro successfully infiltrates the castle, real shiro dies in galra captivity  
>  **β** \- alt-keith meets alt-shiro in the web of alternate realities that is far too large for them to ever hope to traverse, and you bet your bottom dollar the same thing is happening elsewhere  
>  **γ** \- shiro dies slowly from quintessence poisoning after being experimented on by the galra again  
>  **δ** \- the best of the worst. shiro and keith live out their lives in peace after the war but at what cost? shiro loses his memories due to long-term trauma
> 
> i understand this is antithetical to the main themes of VLD as portrayed in the show, and i too want a happy ending for shiro because he's already been through so much -- it would be unconscionable not to write one in canon for a prisoner of war who tries his best to survive despite being plagued by PTSD, but that ball is in the writers' court, not mine. on the flipside, sheith as a ship seems to pit the eventual happiness of our boys against a smorgasboard of eldritch horrors, including but not limited to body horror, bodily injury, brainwashing, mind control, death, the loss of one's loved one to the great unknown, etc. the writers have also said that since alternate realities exist, all ships are canon somewhere, so why not _bad end_ alternate realities? therefore i think this fic fits right into the current discussion, though after exploration of the subject it is not something i would readily advocate. honestly i think sheith in general is something that takes lots of emotional energy to explore, and i am spent. for my next trick, i will make keith reveal his deepest desires about caressing shiro's beautiful ample bosom. or will i.
> 
> the title comes from the concept of endgame principles in chess and is alluded to in the phrase "the cosmos had always had you in check" in the last section.
> 
> thanks for reading! if you enjoyed this please consider leaving some feedback (don't feel obliged!!!), or even better, [COME SAY HI TO ME](http://twitter.com/iiejn) n__n i don't bite.


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